literary transcript

 

66

William Thompson

c. 1785–1833

 

An Irish precursor of Karl Marx may seem an historical anomaly, but William Thompson, a wealthy landowner and apostle of social justice, was just such an anomaly.  According to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the British socialists, Marx was 'Thompson's disciple'.  At one time, before the fall of communism, a bust of William Thompson was among the items displayed at the International Communist Museum in Prague.

      Perhaps the first Irish economist, William Thompson was born in Cork about 1785.  His father was Alderman John Thompson, a prosperous Protestant merchant who had been mayor of the city and high sheriff of the county.  In those days all such posts were not open to Catholics.  When his father died in 1814, William inherited not only the lucrative family business in Cork itself, but also 1,500 acres at Cloonkeen near Rosscarbery, overlooking Glandore harbour.

      He was now a man of property himself.  However, the social conditions of his own tenants, and the population of Ireland as a whole, led him into a course of wide reading in political economy.  He was not much interested in increasing his wealth.  He lived in a large town house with a fine library, and was a prominent member of many of Cork's literary and scientific groups.  But his ideas were not those of his own class.

      Thompson was atheist.  From his travels in Europe, he had returned filled with enthusiasm for the French Revolution.  He walked around his lands in Glandore with the tricolour tied to his walking stick.  In elections in 1812 and 1826 he supported Catholic interests, to the disdain of his relatives.

      On inheriting the estate he gave his tenants long leases and began to work for the improvement of the land and his tenants' lives.  He neither smoked nor drank, and by the end of his life had become a vegetarian.  'I am not what is usually called a labourer,' he remarked.  'Under equitable social arrangements, possessed of health and strength, I ought to blush in making this declaration.'

      After studying the writings of Jeremy Bentham, he became an enthusiast for utilitarianism and socialism.  He became an intimate friend of Bentham.  He also supported the cooperative community which the Scottish pioneer Robert Owen had established at New Lanark.

      Thompson made his own mark as a writer, making important contributions to early socialist thought, anticipating the theory of surplus value which Marx was to later expound at length in Das Kapital.

      'It is this exposition of the social right of the worker to the full product of his labour,' writes the Irish economist Dr Patrick Lynch, 'that makes Thompson the founder of "scientific" socialism and the most important forerunner of Karl Marx.'  Marx, of course, was far wider ranging in his study of economics than Thompson, and there is only one specific reference to Thompson in Das Kapital.  But his ideas are there.

      Thompson was also a pioneer in the advocacy of equal rights for women.  His most important book was An Inquiry Into the Principals of the Distribution of Wealth, Most Conductive to Human Happiness: Applied to the Newly-Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth, published in 1824.  He considered unearned income from rents and stocks, as well as private property, as leading inexorably to social injustice.  He saw the just distribution of wealth as the key to political economy and the advance of social progress.

      His friend Robert Owen had based his appeal for social justice on the rich.  Thompson realized that if the working class was to move forward, it must rely on its own efforts.  Again, in his assessment of the influence of the economic environment on the shaping of political attitudes, he was certainly a most important pioneer in socialist thought.  But he did not believe in state intervention; what he had seen of it in Ireland had been corrupt.  He envisioned the state withering away to be replaced by a cooperative commonwealth.

      A visit by Robert Owen to Dublin had inspired one cooperative experiment on an estate in Clare, which lasted until 1833.  In 1830 Thompson himself published a work on establishing such communities, and pushed ahead with plans to transform his own estate at Glandore.  He drafted a constitution for it, giving women equal rights and allowing for the exclusion of the idle and the vicious.

      In these projects he had the assistance of Anna Wheeler, the daughter of an Anglican archbishop and the granddaughter of Henry Gratton.  With her help he had written his Appeal of One-half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political and Then in Civil and Domestic Slavery.

      He died at Cloonkeen, Rosscarbery, in West Cork on 28th March 1833.  Though he was without religion, a nephew who assumed he was his heir, had him buried as a Christian at Drumbed.  But Thompson had left his body for dissection, stipulating that the skeleton was to be preserved in a museum on the grounds of the first cooperative community to be established in the British Isles according to his ideas.

      What became of his remains is now a mystery, though the doctor who exhumed the body said that the bones had been sent to Anna Wheeler 'as a memento of love'.  When the will was read, the nephew was astonished to find that he and the family had been left nothing. William Thompson had left his estate to the benefit of the poor, to be run along the lines of New Lanark and according to the principles of Robert Owen.  But after a quarter of a century of legal litigation, this will was set aside.  Naturally, the lawyers profited the most.

      The memory of William Thompson the man has faded.  As Dr Patrick Lynch pointed out, 'His place in international socialist thought, and in the social democratic tradition in Ireland, deserves to be put into the proper setting and perspective.  Irish [people], at least, should recall the Cork landlord, who, like the United Irishmen, supported the people of no property; and who, in addition, furnished an important footnote, at least, to the history of economic thought wherever and by whom it is written.'